Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday July 01, 2008 @01:01AM
from the fast-track dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009. According to a draft schedule discussed at a recent meeting, Mozilla wants to have the first Firefox 3.1 developer preview ready by July, then move to a beta by August. The schedule slates final code delivery in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2009. A month ago, when Mozilla first started discussing Firefox 3.1 internally, Mike Schroepfer, the company's vice president of engineering, said the upgrade's target ship date was the end of 2008. If Mozilla holds to that plan, Firefox 3.1 would be its first fast-track update. Firefox 3.0, for instance, launched approximately 20 months after its predecessor, Firefox 2.0."

What's versioning got to do with release dates?It even says in the summary that this is to be the first "fast-track" update, hence the relatively minor version jump.Firefox 3 was a huge leap over firefox 2, hence the major jump. 1.5 was more of an extension to FF1 than an entirely new version, so to me, at least, the inconsistent version numbers are consistent with the changes and additions to the browser.

Thank you. I was trying to post the same, but I apparently lost my cookies when I upgraded to FF3. Many projects use the {Major}.{Minor}.{Bug/Service Release} model, pretty much as described, but many only appear to use the model. For some [postgresql.org], the second digit is the major version.

Well, if it fixes that tendency to crash the browser if I close a Gmail tab, I'm all for it.
Switching Gmail to BasicHTML and then closing the tab preserves the session. And this ugly baby is easily repeated. Saw bug reports on both Ubuntu and Gentoo about this.
I dunno if it's FF3.0 proper, or the half-dozen extensions (which performed flawlessly under 2.0.14), but it sure is annoying.

You can keep dreaming. While Firefox 3.1 is certainly going to improve on Firefox 3.0 (Firefox 3.0 gets 71/100, Firefox 3.1 pre-alpha 1 gets 80/100, I predict Firefox 3.1 final to get 80-90/100), the aim to make changes drastic enough to make Firefox 3.1 pass Acid3 and the aim to get Firefox 3.1 released in a Q4 2008/Q1 2009 timeframe are plainly incompatible. I'd expect Acid3 to pass in Firefox 4.0 myself. Shouldn't be much of a surprise given how long it took Firefox to pass the Acid2 test, but then that never stopped us from using it.;-)

I'd really rather they focus on important things first. The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.

Really the updates to the bookmark system scheduled for 3.1 are probably going to make a bigger impact on most users than Acid compliance would.

I think the main point of getting 3.1 out there is to get the features in that couldn't be completed for 3.0 but weren't necessities. And with the level of rebuilding that 3.0 required it's not a shock that a few less important features would have to be dropped to get the important stuff finished.

I'll probably enjoy the user interface changes myself (I haven't go acquainted much with the 'awesomebar', I'm waiting on my extensions), but I'm really more excited about some backend changes. @font-face [mozilla.org] is my 'pet bug' of the moment, I'd like to see that in Firefox 3.1. I'm also watching progress on SVG animation [mozilla.org] and SVG in img tag [mozilla.org]. I'm reasonably hopeful for seeing better and more flexible SVG support in Firefox 3.1, and it's about time.

The Acid tests are specifically much harder than what a browser needs to handle to do a good job with web browsing, in fact a few of the tests specifically use broken code IIRC.

The things tested by ACID3 are not in general use because browsers don't reliably support them. Many would be in use if they were actually supported. That is the aim of ACID3, to drive browser makers to actually fix these things so people can finally start using them.

Acid3 is a dumb test. Acid1 and Acid2 tested against a number of dependencies and special cases to ensure broad compliance with the standard. That's what made them useful tests.

In contrast, Acid3 is a hodgepodge of features from different standards that are broken or unimplemented in different browsers. It lacks the coherence of the earlier tests. That means you can game it pretty easily by implementing one small part of a standard while not having a genuinely useful implementation. In fact, that's what sev

Clearly not just broken code. Comment #1 on a bugzilla bug I'm not going to link to out of thoughtfulness to bugzilla.

"FF2, FF3, Opera9.2x and Opera9.5b have the behavior, which DOM 2 Range defines(although the wording in the spec could be better for sure).Safari3.1 doesn't have that behavior nor does "ACID3'ed-Opera".

I've proposed that ACID3 should be fixed, but so far no success in that."

I would agree, but they HAVE to shoot for Acid 3 compatibility for the next release or browser nerds will be up in arms and it will be a huge PR problem.

It'll only be a PR problem in the small circle of "browser nerds", everyone else will just get on with their lives, having realised there's more to life then what score your favourite browser gets in the Acid 3 test.

Your computer must suck. Every day over lunch I end up having about 20 tabs open plus Lotus notes and any sort of combination of Dreamweaver, eclipse, photoshop, etc. and this computer isn't even naer top spec. My home computer is even older and I've had no issues.

Perhaps I just know how to take care of my computer more than others.;)

Yes, Firefox 3 does seem improved. But it still becomes a CPU hog (not
crashes) when there have been a lot of windows and tabs open for several days,
especially when Windows XP has been put into and out of hibernation several
times.

I just re-started Firefox because of that problem. I was already using
NoScript and Adblock Plus, and now, since the re-start, I'm using Flashblock
again, also.

As I mentioned, I went to Tools/ Options/ Applications/ and selected
"Always ask" or "Save File" for every applica

that I don't see why a browser should be expected to perform well against your criteria.

FF is open source, so it would be a simple enough thing for you to either fork it yourself or hire someone with the skills to do so, and build a variant that could be left running for days on end, with hundreds of tabs left open.

But I'm not sure that the community needs a browser that meets these requirements

Im glad to see them coming out with a.1 release, it says that we are going to develop upon this platform and make it stable. I dont think they have done that since the pre 1.0 days. They called the first one 1.0 then 1.5 jumped to 2.0 and then rocketed to 3.0. So my question is: Why is this "simple".1 upgrade going to take nearly 6 months? This is just getting the features they wanted in place for 3.0 but scrapped do to time, i thought. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Firefox 2.0 was also supposed to be a quick development, based on the same gecko branch. It eventually took about a year.
I think the past record of Mozilla.org has repeatedly shown that it is unable to release a product on time, given the huge amount of testing/fixing iterations that must come before the final release. A Firefox "quick release" will take time, and divert resources from important future projects such as Gecko 2.
I would have thought Mozilla.org would have finally admitted that the architecture and development model of Firefox is characterised by long maturation times. This is needed to keep up its high quality level.

I'm passing up the opportunity to moderate you as 'troll' despite your obvious troll post on the basis that maybe, just maybe, you have some evidence to back up those statements. I'm not sure what bugs you're talking about but I use Firefox all day long every single day and very rarely have any problems.

I also use an application (MediaCoder) that I believe uses the XUL parts of Firefox seemingly without any problems (other than annoying load times for what should really be a simple control panel thing).

You're almost certainly going to get it, with Ogg Theora support at the very least (a DirectShow backend for Windows, QuickTime backend for Mac OS X, and GStreamer backend for Linux are also in the works). But the real question that no one seems to be asking is, where is HTML 5 audio support? It's just as much a part of the specification, and Ogg Vorbis is well-known enough that corporate entities aren't so worried about patents. I've seen some work [bluishcoder.co.nz] on it recently, but I'm not sure it's mature enough to make the deadline. HTML 5 audio and video support in Firefox 3.1 would be a dream though. Safari already has at least some support [webkit.org] for both, and Opera has partial support [opera.com] for audio with video surely not far off. Internet Explorer is obviously going to take a long time to catch up, but I guess we can't have everything...

I have been using Firefox 3.0 with a new profile, but I have observed that it has absurdly high CPU usage.

For example, if I open just three tabs of slashdot, the usage jumps to 85-99% territory (and stays there even after the pages have stopped loading), and the computer starts locking up. Only two extensions too, adblock and flashblock.

Does anyone know what the hell is going on, and how to get this CPU usage to manageable 10% levels. I don't recall the exact number, but I do not think that the 2.xx ever

I have no idea what's going on with your comp, but on my 3 year old Athlon LAPTOP with 512mb RAM, I'm getting 0 to 4% CPU usage with 3 tabs of Slashdot open. When I move the mouse around it jumps to 8%.

Adblock with large filtersets tends to bog down on slashdot because the sheer amount of text/code it has to work through on each page (especially with the new comment system enabled) try disabling adblock to see if it helps.

I know this was modded funny, but it's a genuine problem. They should try to increment the revision, not the minor version number, because most extensions are compatible with FF 3.0.* - revision increments are supposed to not break the APIs - whereas a minor version increment will suddenly cause all non-updated extensions to get disabled once again. Not good. Especially with Firefox's overly-aggressive update mechanism, ensuring virtually everyone will quickly switch to 3.1.

I really have come to like the new development style on the Kernel 2.6 branch. At first, I thought that rolling new features in with security and bug fixes was a bad idea, but it has worked out really nicely. Other projects should consider doing these rolling releases.

It would be great if the Firefox team could release updates on a schedule... I know, I know it is a crazy dream.

But think of it this way. Release the incremental updates (.x) every quarter or six months and release them on time. Release version updates every 12 -24 months, up the the FF team, but stick to the schedule. If the FF team could do that it would show constant improvement and drive MS nuts.

Isn't this how the Ubuntu team operates? I know it is an apples to oranges comparison but I think it could work. There is no way MS could keep up with a consistent release schedule.

3. Use a stable, mature browser in a rock solid OS -- Konqueror!...Who am I kidding? Konq is usually pretty solid, but likes to crash (very occasionally) when editing textareas. Unlike Firefox, the contents of that textarea will be completely gone... which leads to a lot of re-typed Slashdot comments.

I understand what you are getting at, but XP shouldn't crash, and if it does you likely have a driver or hardware problem. However, if it makes you feel better under Vista firefox 3 crashes constantly while firefox 2 only rarely crashed. I would switch back if firefox 3 wasn't so much faster.

In addition the parent might be interested in installing Adblock+ (to block all flash ads) and maybe give a try to Gnash (opensource reimplementation of flash - it's still buggy, but at least it runs in a separate process and doesn't take the whole browser down).

3.1 is badly needed! Firefox 3.0 is crashing left and right. I guess they were too eager to get it out the door.

P.S: I don't have any add-ons installed.

On what OS? How much memory? What processor (and how overclocked is it?)? What else is crashing on your system? Please provide a link to the bugzilla report too. With no addons, this should be easy to diagnos.

I had 3.0 beta virtually from the get-go. On my machine, it's crash-happy. So is the official release. Not often. Not all the time. But I occasionally get a nice little grey box telling me that Firefox has crashed, and asking me if I'd like to report the circumstances.

Only times I've had firefox 3 go down is on particular, badly made, flash-based sites, when trying to do specified things, which makes me fairly sure it's Adobe's fault.

It also seems to me that the latest Linux Flash release is much worse than the previous ones (which were pretty bad already). I don't know if Adobe replaced the Linux team or used new tools, but I hope the trend doesn't continue given the number of Flash tools being deployed online.

6 months isn't "quick", its only the Alpha in a month...that's about normal for most smaller software, especially for a point (*.1) update, this isn't Firefox 4.0.

Hell, Opera released 9.51 RC1 (now on RC2) just a few days after 9.5...

Its pretty normal as far as I see it, and I'm glad they are (or seem to be) returning to a more consistent release schedule, it may eventually become my default browser again, which it hasn't been since Phoenix.

People getting bent out of shape about the address bar is simply absurd. While I admit, the option to turn it off should appear somewhere, if only in about:config, the development team isn't ignoring it's users. I have a feeling far more people LIKE the new address bar than dislike it. I certainly find it very useful at times. I also happen to find the new user interface to be well thought out and designed.

The "it's only one option in the config dialog" argument is wearing a bit thin. It also demonstrates a lack of understanding on what testing is required for even simple options. Perhaps terms like "decision coverage" and "condition/decision coverage" are meaningless to you, but they are quite important to software testers. Also important is the psychological concept of the paradox of choice in which many people will not make a choice if presented with too many options. I really am quite sick of hearing, "But it's just one little check box in the option dialog." Take a second and think about how many features that has been said about. Then take a second to consider how much your really now about good user interface design and how much research is done in the area of human/computer interaction.

The changes presented in Firefox 3.0 are actually quite minor when compared to other UI modifications such as Office 2007 or KDE 4. Such drastic language on your part is quite uncalled for. The changes presented in Firefox's front end are, in fact, not for the sake of change but rather for the sake of improvement. I hope comments like yours don't encourage the developers to stagnate on a single UI design because every time they work to improve it, a vocal minority of rigid people can't pull a stick out of their ass.

I have a feeling far more people LIKE the new address bar than dislike it.

I'm one of the people who, for the most part, really likes the new address bar. Being able to type in a site's title to get to the url is a great time saver for me. However, there is one thing I can't stand about it, which is that sometimes it takes a second or two for it to load (especially if I'm on battery power and the hard drive is spun down) and in the meantime firefox freezes. If they could just sort that problem out I'd be very happy.

Try playing around with "browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize" and "browser.urlbar.search.timeout" in about:config. The prefs file says this about it.

// Size of "chunks" affects the number of places to process between each search// timeout (ms). Too big and the UI will be unresponsive; too small and we'll// be waiting on the timeout too often without many results.

I just wish it would stop crashing every time I start it until I restart my computer. Even does it in (firefox) safe mode. I want to downgrade back to 2.0, but the download on their ftp does not seem to work.

The "awesome bar" is pretty nice, and I can't see that it is any more difficult to use versus the old urlbar. I really have never gotten a clear answer on how the new one is worse than the old one. I've seen some complaints about how typing "w" now gets a bunch of useless results due to "www", but you c

People get "bent out of shape" because something that worked well for them has been taken away and replaced with something that (for them) works less well, is less intuitive (when I'm in a URL entry box, I don't expect to have searches on titles), looks awful (that two line layout is not nice to read, despite having pretty colours) and does not allow a return to old functionality. If "awesome bar" had been an option, then there wouldn't be a fuss. But the developers seem to have decided they know what is be

"Kindergarten interface" is probably the most subjective complaint possible on the matter and last time I checked, kindergartners don't write in a sans serif font face. If you're referring to multiple colors, there is scientific research to support such a change, but then again you consider research to be garbage so I don't see you taking much stock in that.

It's also interesting how you reiterate "Change for the sake of change isn't good" with no new content despite that very point having been dealt with i

It's actually put in there by the Mozilla devs because they have this plan for world domination. So you bet that hole will be there in FF3.1 and every FF after that! They need to control your computer someho, don't they?